Doubtless that thought combined with the difficulties of changing a complex system like school is what led to the spread of groupwork, which purports to nurture the vital skill of collaboration within the existing constraints of the classroom. This is a grave mistake though, because group work is teamwork’s evil twin, a dark perversion of the art of cooperation and it would be better if every second in the classroom was spent in monkish silence than in this twisted practice.

Groupwork, where typically three or four students are instructed to work together to produce a piece of writing or a presentation, suffers from two fatal flaws. The first is that although it will be stipulated that all the group must participate, in practice there will be no enforcement of this. Consequences, if they ensue at all, will only kick in if no work is produced at all, not if work is produced but the rest of the group were free-riders on the effort of the most conscientious - indeed that is the standard result of group work. As you’re reading this blog there’s a better than even chance you were one of those geeky pillars propping up this rotting edifice but remember you’re in the minority here, most children respond to a group task by thinking “someone will have to do this work, but it doesn’t have to be me”.

The second great flaw is that the group in question has no identity; no one has a stake in its success or failure beyond possible consequences for them as individuals. This is the key difference from teamwork where the success of the team is the ultimate goal towards which the effort of each individual is pooled. Groupwork purports to nurture the vital skill of working with others, while swapping out “come together for a common cause” with “try or don’t try according to a calculation of your self interest”. We’re not throwing the baby out with the bath water here, we’re holding it under until it drowns.

You might think describing the mundane practice of how children are sometimes given homework in these terms hyperbolic, but that underrates the importance of education. At school we learn a lot of knowledge, some of which we forget immediately some more slowly as the years roll on, but alongside this explicit instruction is a deeper, unconscious process of learning how the world of work works. We learn the difference between professional and casual behaviour, how tasks go from conception through execution to review and when it comes to working with our peers we learn that shared tasks are either a chore to be avoided or a vehicle for self promotion.

The generation raised with groupwork, roughly those who were at school this century, enter the workplace viewing the idea that they should do anything that’s not explicitly their job with suspicion and that they should do part of someone else’s job with horror. They experience a manager’s attempts to make them do these things not as the inevitable back and forth of being an individual serving an organisation whose goals supersede their own interests, but as vindictiveness. The idea that they be singled out and made to do a task that could be done by anyone is so alien that it can only have come from malice. Businesses, charities and public sector bodies invest millions in correcting these attitudes in us as adults, but it’s a mostly futile struggle because the first principles we lay down on any subject are so hard to dislodge.

Groupwork is an object lesson in the folly of taking a system that works, in this case students being taught academic subjects, and tacking on to it a noble goal, teamwork, without thinking through whether the change actually serves the intended purpose. Teamwork is important enough to consider more radical changes to the school curriculum to embed it properly, but groupwork actively harms our ability to work together and should be put in the bin.

Of recorded thefts in financial year 2024/2025, 8% resulted in a summons to appear in court. When found guilty the vast majority of defendants receive a fine. Such low odds of being caught, combined with the fact that if you are, the penalty will be to repay some of what you’ve stolen is clearly a very weak deterrent.

The numbers being imprisoned for theft have also gone up since before the pandemic but due to changes to sentencing guidelines discouraging short sentences these will be serious, repeat offenders. Prison is ruinously expensive, to taxpayers and even more so to the convicted. Like parents who ignore their children’s misbehaviour before snapping, screaming and smacking, our response is first too lenient and then too harsh.

We need a form of punishment that’s more effective than non custodial sentences and cheaper than prison. Luckily we don’t have to invent a new solution to this problem we can revive an old one: the stocks. Make people sit in a public place next to a sign explaining their crime so that passers by can see they broke the law. This would be deeply unpleasant (the shame of it would no doubt be compounded by sharing of photos and videos online) but it would be over in a matter of hours and the criminal would be able to begin their rehabilitation straight away, without the disruption to work and family life that prison wreaks.

The stocks fell out of favour during the Victorian period when an increasingly professional state sought to tackle society’s problems with as little input from the man, or the mob, on the street as possible. We’re at the other end of that tunnel now. The professional state is swamped with problems it can’t fix and the mob is us, ordinary citizens who are sick of subsidising those who take what they want without paying.

Committing crimes is dishonourable; it’s right to use shame to correct that behaviour and it’s right to recruit the law-abiding majority as partners in inflicting that shame. To say to the criminals making society more expensive and worse that we, the people who play by the rules, think their behaviour is bad and we want it to stop.

The IEA estimated the size of the UK’s market for cannabis to be £2.6 billion in 2017 which is £3.5 billion in today’s pounds. While we’re not trying to stop this trade in any serious way, the pretence that we are means that all this money flows to petty criminals. Given the state of the public finances is that a good choice?

We could use this money to help those whose lives are derailed by drug use. It could fund a functioning child mental health system, something we lack at present, which could intervene before young people turn to drugs as way of coping with other issues.

That being said, we should be respectful of the free market and what it could do to us if let loose on this product line. Legalisation should come with safeguards to minimise the chance of recreational drug users becoming problem ones. There is a way to do this though, and it maximises the revenue raised: the government becomes the monopoly seller of marijuana, ecstasy, ketamine and psychedelics.

The disadvantages of state monopolies, lack of innovation, occasional shortages, etc are upsides in this case - the goal is not, as it would be in a fully legal market, to sell as much as possible but to raise revenue from light, recreational use while minimising consumption at levels likely to lead to health problems. There’d be no advertising and no actor in the system with an incentive for users to consume more drugs than are compatible with a healthy and productive life.

A direct payment system (drugs.gov) could help to keep people on the recreational side of the divide. The drift into a problematic drug habit runs through self deception but here the app you buy with tells you how much you’ve bought recently, how your use compares with others, whether your consumption is steady or increasing. In the case of ketamine, a warning that you personally are on a trajectory that will lead to medical problems would be more powerful than our current untargeted messaging about the side effects of sustained use.

Prices could also scale, so every purchase of drugs raises the price you pay next time unless you wait for it to drop back down. As well as discouraging high consumption this would also make it unviable to be an illegal reseller of legally obtained supply. The goal should be to find the balance where the general price point is low enough to drive out illegal supply while heavy personal use is made prohibitively expensive.

Just because we’ve given up trying police public recreational drug use doesn’t mean we have to embrace it. I think it should be legal to smoke weed in the privacy of your home but I don’t want you walking past my kids on the street with a joint in your hand. Here, paradoxically, a legal regime allows us to be more restrictive than prohibition. We could give the police discretionary power to remove a citizen’s right to buy drugs. Anyone caught smoking in public has their face scanned and a ban on further purchase applied - it could be done on a phone in seconds. This would be a far more effective deterrent than the status quo where theoretically you could face criminal sanction for smoking in public but realistically you never will.

Almost three million people use drugs according to the crime survey of England and Wales and yet we’re not living through a crisis of drug related harms because the vast majority of those people are doing so occasionally while otherwise living respectable lives. Over two thirds of them used drugs less frequently than once a month while for just under half it was only once or twice a year. There’s no sign that prohibition is holding down that level of consumption either; four out of ten adults in the survey said it would be very or fairly easy to obtain drugs within 24 hours.

We have a fiscal crisis and we have a way to take billions of pounds out of the pockets of criminals and put them straight into the treasury. Legal but not commercial supply has safeguards to ensure that drug use does not cross over from recreational to problematic and is confined to appropriate places and times. We’re already suffering what downsides there are of widespread recreational drug use - let’s admit that and enjoy the upside too.